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Comment by FrustratedMonky | Hacker News Reader

Doing quick search, there is also interactions between Vasopressin and salt and blood pressure. Could ASD be helped by reducing salt? or increasing salt?

I'm not knowledgeable enough to untangle all of the studies where these terms are also used, which I guess is part of the problem this paper is pointing out, that the terminology/naming is confusing.

Is this saying if you have blood pressure problems you might also be at risk of ASD.

Or opposite, if you have ASD, you might have more risk of blood pressure problems.

"The name AVP refers to the hormone’s role in increasing vascular resistance and regulating blood pressure (via AVP receptor"

"Given the emerging evidence for central AVP signaling abnormalities in ASD, we would expect individuals with ASD, or a subgroup of them, to be at increased risk of AVP-related medical conditions and symptoms. "

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You’re almost there. It’s saying that you’re at risk for central diabetes insipidus known to cause abnormal thirst and urination in like the next paragraph.

What I find hilarious is that the whole first paragraph is about things being named after scientists and then there’s an author named Gesundheit…now I need to look that up.

(Gesundheit = Health)

Sometimes, and sometimes it’s a name.

https://profiles.stanford.edu/neil-gesundheit

And very occasionally it's a serendipitous name!

Nominative Determinism is a hell of a thing.

...and so is Selection Bias.

The article is proposing the latter. Low AVP could contribute to symptoms of ASD. If this is true, they expect a positive correlation between ASD and other better-known issues caused by low AVP.

> Could ASD be helped by reducing salt? or increasing salt?

Personal story here (N=1, not claiming anything other than that). My dad is clearly ASD, and has battled high blood pressure for as long as I can remember. He's now suffering the consequences of 40 years of absolute salt avoidance. 1) I never saw and reduction in the ASD over the past 40 years, 2) lack of salt never changed his blood pressure, and 3) now he's suffering other heath effects, but won't listen to me and only wants to do more of the same.

Avoiding table salt thoroughly could potentially lead to iodine deficiency. It was somewhat common in the past so most table salt over the past century has had iodine added to it to avoid this, but it's cropping back up a bit as people avoid salt or prefer to use "natural rock salts" common in fine cuisine, which are not reinforced with iodine.

Iodine is in a lot of foods.

If it were common enough in available foods then they wouldn't have added it to table salt.

IIRC this was added long ago, when Americans ate less meat, dairy, and seafood and were more prone to malnutrition.

And yet, levels have been measurably going down, and Europeans are already fairly deficient since they don't have as many iodine supplementation programs:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9459956/

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/iodine.htm

My prediction: in fifty years, "low-salt" will have gone the way of "low-fat." Too late for millions of people whose health was injured and lives shortened by these terrible fads.

Improbable since reducing added fats is still as good advice today as it was 5 decades ago.

Exactly right. Reducing dietary fats is "as good" advice as it was or ever will be.

I'm sure you are responding with good intentions, that some 'healthy' fats are needed in a healthy diet.

The demonization of fat is wrong.

But Also

Eating 5lbs of Ribs every day and weighing 300 lbs is not healthy.

Same with salt.

The 'healthy' amount of salt is a U curve. You can have too little, and too much.

It's just in the typical American diet, there is so much Fat and so much Salt, that most people area already at the extreme of the U curve and should probably start cutting back.

> Eating 5lbs of Ribs every day and weighing 300 lbs is not healthy.

If you started at normal weight and ate 5lbs of ribs (or, till satiety) every day, with as much butter as you'd like, but ZERO carbs or artificial sweeteners, you'd never gain weight, much less get to 300 lbs. That's my point.

But don't believe me - this experiment has been done many times.

Google: "zero carb" or "Banting diet."

"or, till satiety"

That is the key.

You can eat vegetables until satiety and also not gain weight.

Banting seems to be about non-processed whole foods. So guess I'm doing that.

My point was more, there is a group that goes 'zero carb' and eat really unhealthily. They take it as a license to pile on the ribs. Not that 'zero carb' by itself is unhealthy.

You'll probably say cholesterol is also ok. But plaque buildup does lead to hearth attack's.

"Unfortunately, emerging research shows that a ketogenic diet actually increases the risk of cardiovascular disease. In a young, fit population of CrossFit athletes, following a keto diet for 12 weeks led to an average weight loss of 6 pounds but increased “bad cholesterol” (LDL-C) by a whopping 35%.

Typically, you would expect to see LDL-C levels drop when you lose weight. LDL-C has long been associated with cardiovascular risk because it forms arterial plaques (a cholesterol build-up in the inner lining of arteries), and emerging research that followed people for 12 years has now directly linked long-term ketogenic"

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2023/keto-its-probably-no....

His BP could be worse with salt.

One thing I always found interesting is that inducing a fever in autistic people, in some of them it will reduce the severity of their autistic characteristics.

citation.

Google. https://hms.harvard.edu/news/cracking-fever-autism-mystery

Your citation looks fine, but telling people to Google for citations is just pointing them straight at spam.

"...in mice."

Confirmed in mice, observed first anecdotally in children with autism.

I'm blown away we still as a society don't have a system where all of this information is quickly accessible in a sorted way by various trusted organizations that follow specific protocols that people determine how trustworthy they are.

That would require us as a society to develop concrete solutions to determining who can be trusted. That’s obviously impossible, so we’re stuck with the process we have.

It's actually the individual's responsibility to develop an understanding of how one determines what is trustworthy and what isn't trustworthy, and they they do their best to develop that. For example, if someone lies, they are caught lying, the evidence is presented but a person doesn't care or put any weight on that someone lied - well, they are going to rank that person or an organization they are running or still party to.

I'd argue it's bad actors who don't want such a highly organized system that helps people discern easier, a sort of societal wide "fog of war" to make knowing closer towards the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth - harder; with AI generated images and video coming, I don't know how society will cope with such a thing - where "video evidence" could exist painting a horrific reputation of someone to destroy them perhaps not only economically but perhaps also weaponizing a mob to kill someone.

you mean like the "science" and "experts" paid off by the sugar industry to promote sugar for 50 years while demonizing fat?

Who was promoting sugar, exactly? This is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof.

The one that weirds me out is that sleep deprivation can quite rapidly reduce depression, if only temporarily:

https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2017/septemb...

I did this in my late young years. It worked. Got started reading into “polyphasic sleeping “ , we were deluded for thinking it could be a long term healthy schedule but it definitely seems to have given me a mood reset and cured my insomnia.

Some of them also respond to anti biotics

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